EA won’t green light any single player-only games

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Frank Gibeau, the president of EA Labels, has shown that business truly does come before gameplay with comments he made as part of a preview document for the CloudGamingUSA event happening on September 11-12 in San Francisco.

Gibeau is very proud of the fact he has never green lit a single project that consisted solely of a single-player experience. He insists that every game EA publishes has an online component to it. His reason for doing this? Apparently EA has “evolved with consumers” suggesting he thinks this is what consumers want in every game.

As a consumer and gamer myself, I can totally disagree with his thinking. Forcing online into every game makes little sense. While it works for a Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Fifa, or Need for Speed title, there’s just as many games that don’t need it to succeed, or even work for online play.

A good example of this would be the forthcoming SimCity , which has upset fans of the series because it will require an constant Internet connection to play. That isn’t a DRM measure, it’s due to the tight integration of multiplayer and how all players impact each others games.

With the comments made by Gibeau, I have to wonder if the multiplayer components in the game were planned from the start, or did Maxis have to add them in order to get the game green lit?

I’m also left wondering how many games aren’t getting made at EA-controlled studios because online doesn’t fit, or the extra time to somehow squeeze it in means the project would go over budget and gets canned instead?

As the growing indie gaming scene has demonstrated, gamers want more diversity, not less. Demanding online components doesn’t encourage that diversity, it forces developers to comply in order to get published, and ultimately spend some of their time getting online to work instead of working on the gameplay.